Improved electricity access has little impact on climate change

A press release from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis: Expanding access to household electricity services accounts for only a small portion of total emission growth, shows a new study from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), shedding light on an ongoing debate on potential conflicts between climate and development.

Improving household electricity access in India over the last 30 years contributed only marginally to the nation’s total carbon emissions growth during that time, according to a new study published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

“Energy access is fundamental to development: it brings improvements to all aspects of life, including education, communication, and health,” says IIASA researcher Shonali Pachauri, who conducted the study.

While increased energy access is widely agreed to be an important goal for development efforts, such as the UN Sustainable Energy for All Initiative, the climate impacts of increased access to electricity have been unclear. The new study is the first to examine the impact of electricity access on carbon dioxide emissions using two sources of retrospective data.

“This study shows that the climate impacts of expanding access are in fact very small,” says Pachauri. However, she adds, expanding low-carbon energy technologies in developing countries would bring many co-benefits beyond climate mitigation.

Pachauri used India as a case study because while the country still lacks electricity access for much of its population—around 400 million people—it has vastly increased access in the last 30 years. From 1981 to 2011, household electricity access in the country improved from around 25% to between 67-74% of the population, an increase of approximately 650 million people.  “India is at a similar stage to many other developing countries in terms of energy access” says Pachauri, “So we believe that these findings will be applicable on a broad scale to other developing countries.”...

Electricity meters in Kolkata, shot by Jorge Royan, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license

Drought dries up California hydropower

Bobby Magill in Climate Central: As California’s historic drought dries up the state’s water supplies and withers its crops, it’s also shaking up the way electricity is produced there. There’s so little water available in the state’s reservoirs that California’s ability to produce hydropower has been cut in half, while its use of renewables and natural gas power has spiked, a U.S. Energy Information Administration report published Monday shows.

Normally, 20 percent of California’s power comes from hydroelectric sources. But not anym
ore. For the first six months of 2014, only 10 percent of the state’s electricity was hydropower, roughly between 900,000 megawatt hours in January and 2.3 million megawatt hours in June, EIA data show. The average hydropower generation for January is  about 2 million megawatt hours, and nearly 4 million megawatt hours in June.

Most of California has been mired in an extreme or exceptional drought since 2011, a phenomenon that recent studies show has a complicated connection to climate change. As of the latest drought monitor, more than 58 percent of California is experiencing the most intense drought conditions, while the entire state is currently seeing some level of severe or extreme drought.

Nearly all of California’s reservoir levels are below average for this time of year, with the water level of Lake Shasta, one of the state’s largest reservoirs, currently sitting at 42 percent of historical average, said California Department of Water Resources spokesman Ted Thomas....

A bear ornament on the downstream side of the Mulholland Dam in Los Angeles. National Park Service photo

Race to electrify rural Africa could help the West too

Lisa Grossman in New Scientist: Turning on the lights in Africa may help to power up the rest of the world sustainably. New investments in mini grid systems aimed at bringing power to rural Africa and other remote areas may provide a test bed for the rural energy infrastructure of the future.

Rich nations are taking an increasing interest in electrifying the rest of the world. At the Africa Leaders Summit in Washington DC this month, US president Barack Obama announced an additional $12 billion in funding for his administration's Power Africa initiative, which aims to help bring power to at least 60 million households and businesses across the continent.

But 85 per cent of the 1.3 billion people lacking electricity worldwide live in rural areas. That means powering Africa won't be as simple as hooking up villages to a centralised power grid. Localised "micro-grids" are beginning to take off. They can generate anything from a few watts to a few megawatts and provide power for tens to thousands of households at a time.

An increasing amount of this power is coming from renewable sources, such as wind, solar and hydro. "It creates an opportunity," says Subhes Bhattacharyya at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK. "You don't have to follow the old-fashioned way of doing things. You can jump the queue to new technologies."

For instance, international group Practical Action is building micro-hydro-power plants in Zimbabwe and Kenya, which harness falling water such as that in mountain rivers.

Another group, a Kenyan start-up called Access:energy, developed a model to teach Kenyans to make parts of wind turbines out of scrap metal and car parts, reducing the need for outside help should a part of the system break. A single turbine can generate about 2.5 kilowatt-hours per day, enough to power a micro-grid for 50 homes....

Solar panels in Malika, Dakar, shot by Fratelli dell'Uomo Onlus, Elena Pisano, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons 3.0 license

Power plants add to flood woes

Eco Business via the Vietnam News: Scientists are concerned about the negative impact of hydro-power plants on people’s lives in areas hit by extreme weather, while rivers in the South become critically polluted by industrial waste.

Viet Nam River Network (VRN), a local non-governmental organization, affirmed at its annual conference held recently that power plants in the Central region had changed the natural flows in rivers and created shortages of water during the dry season.

Studies by scientists working for the network have shown that discharges by the plants’ reservoirs have worsened flood situations, which occur annually in the region. Floods in recent years have had much stronger currents and they inundated lowland areas more quickly than ever before. Local residents in the areas where power plants are located also blamed the reservoirs for waters that flooded their fields and removed top soil.

Le Thi Thu Suu, VRN’s chief coordinator, said climate change impacts had created extreme weather phenomena, including higher rainfalls during rainy seasons and critical shortages of water in dry months. “Power plant reservoirs increase the negative impacts and influence residents, as they hold back water during the dry season, worsening the shortage of water for cultivation and waterway traffic.

“Meanwhile, the reservoirs create large floods when they discharge water in the rainy seasons when lowland areas are flooded with water from high rainfalls. This affects crops and claims lives, as well as floods the properties of local residents,” Suu said, adding that she had evidence collected by local residents in Quang Nam Province....

The spillway of the Ya Ly dam in Vietnam, shot by [Tycho], http://shansov.net, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Lights slowly return to Philippines region devastated by typhoon Haiyan

Aurora Almendral at  NBC News: More than a month since Typhoon Haiyan tore through the Philippines, most of the worst-hit island of Leyte is still mired in darkness when night falls. But the lights are slowly starting to come back on — thanks to the distribution of solar lamps by the United Nations Refugee Agency.

With as many as 12 million people impacted by the storm and nearly 4 million displaced, those left behind have been trying to rebuild new homes on the ruins of their old ones. But a major issue in the makeshift cities has been light. In the wake of major natural disasters, theft, rape, human trafficking and domestic violence can often thrive in the darkness of ramshackle refugee camps.

“With no electricity, people commit these acts with a higher level of impunity,” said Arjun Jain, head of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in the southern Philippines. While reports of this type of violence have so far been isolated, the fear is widespread.

...To bring light where there’s no electricity, UNHCR is distributing solar lanterns in the makeshift villages that have sprung up in the disaster zone. Designed to look like old-fashioned camping lamps, the solar panels get charged after sitting in the sun for eight hours. The charge, which provides illumination for six to eight hours, can also charge mobile phones, according to the UNHCR.

Logistical challenges have made it frustratingly hard to deliver the lanterns. Between supply chain hurdles and the sheer scale of the destruction of basic infrastructure, the delivery of lamps was delayed for more than three weeks....

Map of the Philippines by Thuresson, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

US electrical grid on the edge of failure

Jeff Tollefson in Nature: Facebook can lose a few users and remain a perfectly stable network, but where the national grid is concerned simple geography dictates that it is always just a few transmission lines from collapse.

That is according to a mathematical study of spatial networks by physicists in Israel and the United States. Study co-author Shlomo Havlin of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat-Gan, Israel, says that the research builds on earlier work by incorporating a more explicit analysis of how the spatial nature of physical networks affects their fundamental stability. The upshot, published today in Nature Physics, is that spatial networks are necessarily dependent on any number of critical nodes whose failure can lead to abrupt — and unpredictable — collapse1.

The electric grid, which operates as a series of networks that are defined by geography, is a prime example, says Havlin. “Whenever you have such dependencies in the system, failure in one place leads to failure in another place, which cascades into collapse.”

The warning comes ten years after a blackout that crippled parts of the midwest and northeastern United States and parts of Canada. In that case, a series of errors resulted in the loss of three transmission lines in Ohio over the course of about an hour. Once the third line went down, the outage cascaded towards the coast, cutting power to some 50 million people. Havlin says that this outage is an example of the inherent instability his study describes, but others question whether the team’s conclusions can really be extrapolated to the real world.

“I suppose I should be open-minded to new research, but I'm not convinced,” says Jeff Dagle, an electrical engineer at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, who served on the government task force that investigated the 2003 outage. “The problem is that this doesn’t reflect the physics of how the power grid operates.”...

Transmission pylons at sunset in north Texas, shot by Loadmaster (David R. Tribble), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Yosemite Rim Fire 13th largest in California history, 20 percent contained

NBC (Bay Area): After battling the Rim Fire raging on the outskirts of Yosemite National Park for the last nine days, state and federal fire crews on Monday had contained 20 percent of the wildfire - now the size of Chicago. That is more than double the containment from the day before, and much more than the 2 percent containment for most of the fire reported on Aug. 17 in the heart of the Stanislaus National Forest.

Still, 4,500 structures and San Francisco's water and power supply remained threatened by the Rim Fire, California's 13th largest in history. The total number of acres burned stood at nearly 170,000 on Monday evening.

"Firefighters have a real challenge on their hands," Gov. Jerry Brown said after touring the charred landscape in the afternoon. "This is one of the worst." He said he's make sure the "resources" in terms of "funding and talent" would be made available to continue fighting the Rim Fire, and he thanked everyone battle the blaze - and breathing the noxious air. Without being too specific, he assured the crowd that "California has the money" to fight the fire.

To date, 23 structures burned in the fire, including a popular Bay Area camp - Berkeley Tuolumne Family Camp - an institution for Bay Area families since 1922, which was totally destroyed sometime on Sunday....

The Rim Fire on August 17, 2013, from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Fast-moving wildfire near Yosemite threatens power in San Francisco

Laila Kearney in Reuters: A wildfire raging at the edge of Yosemite National Park is threatening power lines that provide electricity to San Francisco, prompting California Governor Jerry Brown to declare a state of emergency. The fire has damaged the electrical infrastructure serving the city, and forced the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to shut down power lines, the governor said in his declaration.

There were no reports of blackouts in the city, which is about 200 miles west of the park. The wildfire swept further into Yosemite National Park on Friday, remaining largely unchecked as it threatened one of the country's major tourist destinations.

The so-called Rim Fire, which started last week in the Stanislaus National Forest, had blackened 11,000 acres at the northeastern corner of Yosemite as of Friday afternoon after exploding in size overnight, park spokeswoman Kari Cobb said.

The blaze burning in the western Sierra Nevada Mountains is now the fastest-moving of 50 large wildfires raging across the drought-parched U.S. West that have strained resources and prompted fire managers to open talks with Pentagon commanders and Canadian officials about possible reinforcements....

A 2008 controlled burn in Yosemite National Park, shot by Rennett Stowe, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Paying for climate change adaptations and grid resiliency

Christine Hertzog in the Energy Collective: Climate change adaptation plans to harden our electrical infrastructure will be unavoidable and expensive.  The grid needs to be upgraded anyway, as pointed out in the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) Report Card discussed in last week’s article.  It is a momentous opportunity to re-architect our electrical grid to last another 100 years....

But the numbers are huge.  The ASCE report estimates that we’re underinvesting in the distribution grid by $57 billion.  That’s a number based on simply updating existing grid infrastructure.  That doesn’t take into account the hardening of the grid – which includes asset relocation, resiliency strategies such as distributed energy resources (DER), and upgrading infrastructure to withstand extreme weather events caused by climate change.

Utilities can develop short- to long-range plans to upgrade infrastructure, but they don’t have unlimited budgets, and sometimes regulatory policy limits their range of actions.  All of the grid investments discussed in this series will take serious money.  Right now, the only answer is that it comes out of the pockets of ratepayers or taxpayers at the local level.  But adapting the grid for climate change reasons isn’t always caused locally.  It’s a nationally shared responsibility because of our use of fossil fuels.

So how do we fund the multi-billion investments needed to adapt our electrical infrastructure to climate change?  Here is my suggestion:

Create a federal Grid Resiliency State Revolving Fund program to fund projects. The US government now funds drinking water infrastructure projects for publicly- and privately-held water agencies through the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund program, governed by acceptance criteria and guidelines regarding project qualifications.  A similar model could work for grid resiliency projects responding to the negative impacts of climate change.  State involvement helps ensure that funds are targeted to the infrastructure projects that reduce the most grid vulnerabilities caused by climate change...

POWER LINES AT THE P.H. ROBINSON GENERATING PLANT, shot by Jim Olive, EPA photo from 1972

Climate change will force extensive changes to US power grid

Christine Hertzog in the Energy Collective: A recently released report from the US Department of Energy (DOE) details the impacts of climate change on our energy grid (electricity, oil/gas pipelines, etc.), and it is a sobering read.   Titled the “U.S. Energy Sector Vulnerabilities to Climate Change and Extreme Weather,” the DOE report should be thought- and action-provoking for utilities executives, regulators, and us ratepayers.   If you considered Smart Grid policies and renewable energy technologies are disruptive to utility business models and bottom lines, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners convened a couple of sessions during their recent summer conference that focused on climate change adaptation planning and critical infrastructure protection – mostly focused on electricity, but vulnerabilities plague natural gas and transport fuel systems too.  Ratepayers will see these terms pop up more often in the agendas of public utility commissions and city/state/regional planning groups as policy makers and utilities identify all grid infrastructure that is at risk from more extreme weather occurring more often – one of the primary fallouts of climate change.  Each state will have unique and unavoidable impacts.  Once grid vulnerabilities are identified, these weak points will need to be prioritized for upgrading, replacement, relocation, or other “hardening” projects.  (Hardening means strengthening against specific threats – usually cyber or physical in nature.)

Superstorm Sandy offers an eloquent illustration of the magnitude of the problem.  The storm inflicted severe infrastructure damage to a significant portion of the Northeast.  It produced a 9 foot storm surge that overwhelmed parts of New York City – and climate change will continue to produce more precipitation in this region in the future, increasing the likelihood of similar impact devastation potentials.  Grid infrastructure was crippled throughout the region, and it took weeks to restore power to all affected businesses and households.... 

...Just in case Midwesterners were thinking that climate change has no impact on their electrical grids, consider the case of the springtime flooding of the Missouri River in 2011 that inundated the Ft. Calhoun nuclear power plant. This historic flood won’t be historic in the future.  It will be routine as climate change increases winter/spring precipitation.  The local utility already passed a 6.9% electricity rate increase to pay for plant repairs estimated to run $200 million.  It’s likely that these repairs aren’t covering future projects to reduce the facility’s vulnerability to more floods occurring with greater intensity and regularity...

Three pylons (in Canada, as it happens), shot by Immanuel Huybrechts, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Utilities ready for 2013 hurricane season, says Connecticut's governor

Luther Turmelle in the New Haven Register: Gov. Dannel P. Malloy insists that the state’s utilities are ready to handle whatever the 2013 hurricane season dishes out, despite the fact that a Monday night thunderstorm left 21,000 Connecticut Light & Power customers without power.

“Our storm preparations have never been better,” Malloy said Tuesday at the state’s Emergency Operations Center after meeting for more than a half-hour with state utility executives.

The governor said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is predicting an active season this year, with between 13 and 20 named storms, with three to six of them possibly becoming major hurricanes.

Malloy and the utility executives said they have dual goals during this hurricane season, which lasts through the end of October: To strengthen the electric grid to prevent loss of service whenever possible and to restore electricity quickly to homes and businesses.

“Last night’s storm was really severe,” said William Quinlan, senior vice president for emergency preparedness at CL&P. “We can’t prevent every outage.”

Mitch Gross, a CL&P spokesman, said the bulk of Monday night’s outages — 17,000 in East Hartford — were the result of two trees taking out a pair of electric circuits. Gross said the circuits “serve as a major distribution channel” that transfer and control large amounts of electricity...

A dark night at Carbon Based headquarters, shot by Brian Thomas, public domain

Drones used to detect storm damage on utility power lines

Environment News Service has a story about a non-imperial, non-murderous use for drone aircraft: Unmanned aircraft systems, or drones, are proving to be useful at assessing storm damage to electricity distribution systems to help utilities quickly restore power after an outage.

The Electric Power Research Institute tested a variety of different drones at the New Mexico State University's Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Test Center, using high resolution video cameras to transmit images of power lines from a height of 5,000 to 7,000 feet.

Electric utilities can use these images to assess damage and pinpoint damaged locations following a storm. In the wake of a storm, damage assessment is a frequent power restoration choke point, especially when obstacles, such as downed trees, blocked roads or icy conditions make it tough for utility crews to get to and report on distribution line damage.

"Our research clearly shows that drones may provide utilities a tool that could reduce outage restoration time," said Matthew Olearczyk, senior program manager for distribution research at EPRI. "Using live steaming video information, utility system operators would be able to dramatically improve damage assessment," he said...

Electrical lines headed towards Hemble Hill Farm, shot by Mick Garratt, Wikimedia Commons via Geograph UK, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Blizzards push southeastern Europe energy grids to limits

Oleg Vukmanovic and Maja Zuvela in Reuters: Blizzards and ice-laden power lines in southeastern Europe pushed gas and electricity networks near to breaking point Wednesday as consumption soared, while some western countries scrambled to prevent similar breakdowns.

As electricity cables buckled under the weight of ice and snow in southeastern Bosnia, where some 15,000 customers were left in darkness, Serbia warned of a "possible collapse" of its energy system as record-breaking demand stretched the power grid near its technical limits.

Serbia's government adviser for energy issues, Petar Skundric, said the Balkan nation should reduce power consumption by 10 percent "to avoid problems and possible collapse of the energy system."

"In only a week's time Serbia has broken six historical records both in consumption and production of electricity," Skundric told reporters. "The system is operating at the very border of its technical capabilities, and we should do our best to reduce both consumption by at least 10 percent from the current level and production by around some 500 MW," he said....

A snowflake, shot by NOAA

Climate change putting electricity generation at risk

Soumya Karlamangla in AlertNet: Lost life, ecosystem damage, power cuts, job losses and increasingly expensive electricity is the price we pay if governments fail to make their power generation systems more climate-resilient. That's what scientists from the Institute for Development Studies are warning in a report which concludes that no system of generating energy -- not even renewable energy like solar or wind power -- is immune to the effects of climate change.

Tackling the disaster risk to nuclear power generation, the report says quakes, cyclones, hurricanes, typhoons and flooding can have a devastating impact on nuclear power plants. It cites the crisis triggered at Japan's Fukushima plant when an earthquake and tsunami struck the country in March.

"Extreme weather events like storms and floods which can damage nuclear power plants — this is one of the most challenging issues in energy planning today," said Frauke Urban, lead author of the report published by the Strengthening Climate Resilience consortium. "Climate change is another risk for government and energy companies where they really need to rethink the energy planning for the future," she added.

Nuclear power accounts for about 6 percent of global energy generation. Like all power plants, nuclear facilities could face damage to its equipment from floods. Conversely, a drop in rainfall, a rise in temperature or a drought could reduce the amount of available water needed for cooling reactors, potentially posing a serious threat to public safety.

"Siting of major infrastructure, especially energy infrastructure needs to be done very carefully now," said Saleemul Huq, expert on climate change development and senior fellow in the Climate Change Group at the International Institute of Environment and Development....

The Civaux nuclear power plant in France, shot by Greudin (I think), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Africa must move climate change higher on priority list

Leah McMillan And Hany Besada in the Edmonton Journal (Canada): The power outage that swept across north-central U.S. and southeastern Canada in 2003 left businesses incapacitated, many closing their doors to wait out the blackout. About 55 million people were affected. Hospitals were forced to rely on backup generators.

In stark contrast, the Tanzanian government has been trying to reassure its citizens via local news media that electricity will improve "soon" -- a promise that remains to be filled, despite mention of improvements in newspapers over the past few months. Electricity in Tanzania is unreliable, due to a government with limited capacity to fund electricity, and a two-year-long drought that has severely depleted sources for hydroelectric dams. At times, the power is rationed. At the beginning of the week, major newspapers reveal when each community can expect cuts.

…Mothers are told ceiling fans reduce the number of mosquitoes, decreasing the risk of malaria to their babies. Malaria kills one million African infants annually. But they can't turn the fans on. The World Health Organization reports two million deaths per year related to cooking by burning solid fuels inside their homes, yet how else does one cook without electricity?

African governments have been encouraged to use alternative energy sources both to counter their electricity challenges and ensure environmental sustainability.

The World Energy Council says only seven per cent of Africa's available hydro power has been developed. The Nile River's hydroelectric potential is put at 8,000 megawatts, while East Africa has an estimated installed capacity of 1,800 MW. Meanwhile, the Congo Basin, for example, could provide electricity for almost one-third of the continent if promoted properly.

The speed at which weather patterns change, and the unpredictability that is leaving even the most attuned nomadic farmer perplexed, are direct results of climate change....